Author: David

For IT pros, the benefits of the cloud are by now familiar. But as enticing as the agility, streamlined management and on-demand provisioning benefits that cloud computing offers, security remains an area of deep concern.

And while leading vendors have made considerable strides in addressing the potential security problems associated with the cloud — both real and perceived — the security burden still falls to both suppliers and customers, many of whom have been moving rapidly to embrace the technology but sometimes treat security as an afterthought.

"The race to the cloud is on," says Rand Wacker, vice president of product management at CloudPassage, a two-year-old startup specializing in securing cloud servers. "Companies large and small are scrambling to increase their speed to market, and reduce cost by moving their servers to a cloud-based architecture."…

The Fedora Project has officially released version 17 of its leading-edge Linux distribution, adding the latest update to the OpenStack cloud computing platform, JBoss Application Server 7 and oVirt, a virtualisation management tool.

Available now, Fedora 17 is a free-to-download Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat, where many cutting-edge technologies are given a shake-down before future inclusion into Red Hat Enterprise Linux…

In a move to garner valuable support from the developer community while honing its own big data chops, EMC-offshoot Greenplum has unveiled a cloud computing cluster called Analytics Workbench, built on Hadoop, on which developers can freely experiment with their code in the cloud.

Greenplum’s end goal is to see Hadoop widely deployed in the enterprise — no doubt with the company’s own big data analytics tool in the mix as it takes on rivals like IBM and Oracle, as well as other organizations jumping aboard the Hadoop wagon.

The 1,000-node cluster boasts 24PB of physical storage and 48TB of memory, and it comes loaded with the entire Hadoop stack, including the Hadoop Distributed File System, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase, and Mahout. Also in the grab bag is Greenplum Database, intended to augment the workbench’s SQL capabilities. Additionally, Greenplum is serving up open, freely available data — both structured and unstructured — from such sources as social media, sensor devices, and call centers. The cluster is connected via 56Gbps InfiniBand interconnect…

Perhaps the largest point of confusion with regards to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and cloud computing is the question of upon whose shoulders does compliance fall? In 2011, several cloud providers began asserting that their clouds were validated as PCI DSS compliant. That’s all well and good, but unfortunately this validation does not trickle down to the providers’ customers who deploy servers within the provider’s infrastructure. If your organization wants to migrate PCI DSS in-scope systems to public cloud, there are several things to consider.

First and foremost, a cloud provider’s platform is just that – a platform. Physical servers are not certified PCI compliant by the hardware manufactures; just as operating system vendors are not. The platform and software employed serves as a medium upon which businesses can operate. It should be noted, however, that PCI certification for a provider does not just cover material, but process as well…

GoGrid on Tuesday announced the availability of its Private Cloud service in the company’s newest data center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. "We’re excited to bring our Private Cloud to Amsterdam," stated John Keagy, CEO, GoGrid. "The new solutions make it easy for companies to create the secure environments their business requires, including full isolation of end-user infrastructure to ensure regulatory or industry compliance."

To satisfy demand, GoGrid has created three new Private Cloud offerings to help customers worldwide take advantage of scalable compute power, virtual server images, load-balanced infrastructure, private networking, and elastic storage in a completely dedicated and secure environment-without hardware procurement or resource sharing…

Google said Monday it had received ISO 27001 certification for Google Apps for Business, a recognition of its information security practices that will make its cloud services more palatable for use in government and other regulated industries.

Back in 2007, when Google first introduced a version of Google Apps for Business–under the name "Google Apps Premiere Edition"–worries about security made many companies reluctant to migrate from on-premises IT to cloud computing.

Since then, Google has addressed those concerns, where warranted, through features like the integration of Postini’s enterprise message services, support for two-factor authentication, and the launch of FISMA-certified Google Apps for Government…

Two years ago at the NetHope Global Member Summit, NetHope co-founder Edward G. Happ pushed our member organizations to collaborate more to run more efficient operations. He said it is not NGOs’ core competency to run data centers or computer server-farms. In order to maximize their impact in Emergency Response, Humanitarian Development and Conservation, international NGOs would be better served by banding together to off-load IT operations tasks to solution providers who see hosting and cloud services as their core missions. This would allow the IT department to focus on more mission-moving technologies.

NetHope has since created an initiative to help NGOs adopt cloud technologies and better serve their beneficiaries. The idea is to increase uptake of successful cloud solutions among the NetHope membership as well as expand cloud service awareness and education to members and organizations, institutions and agencies beyond NetHope. Cloud-based technologies can be a good fit to solve challenges across all verticals — whether it’s mobile assessment of orphans and vulnerable children to increase their well-being or providing financial management training to increase numbers of small hold farmers without a commensurate increase in cost; many solutions can be reapplied to tackle problems in different sectors with minimal tweaking…

In today’s day and age, many SMBs and enterprise-level businesses are "taking to the skies" with cloud computing. These companies realize that working in the cloud comes with many benefits — including reduced cost of in-house hardware, ease of implementation and seamless scalability. However, as you will read on and discover – performance-impacting file fragmentation and the need for defragmentation still exists and is actually amplified in these environments. Based on these factors, it must now be addressed with a two-fold proactive and preventative solution.

Let’s face it — we generate a tremendous amount of data and it’s only the beginning. In fact, findings included in a recent study by IDC titled "Extracting Value from Chaos" predict that in the next ten years we will create 50 times more information and 75 times more files. Now regardless of destination, most of this data is generated on Windows-based computers, which are known to fragment files. Therefore, when files are manipulated they become fragmented before even reaching the cloud. This occurs because as they are worked with, they get broken up into various pieces and scattered to numerous locations across the hard disk. The result is increased time necessary to access these files and affects system performance…

While the promise of the cloud is more cost-effective IT, the reality is that once companies move beyond simple deployment into a wholesale enterprise architecture shift, they often bump up against unanticipated expenses that threaten the cloud’s principal value proposition.

It could be a development team that spins up hundreds of servers for load testing that they then forget to switch off, or a marketing team reserving dozens of new server instances to run a specific campaign when there are untapped enterprise resources they could otherwise deploy. Whatever the case, the ‘aha moment’ around the cloud’s hidden costs typically presents itself along with a hefty bill that can leave some CFOs questioning the long-term viability of the cloud as a cost-effective platform.

"It’s the shocking bill problem–that’s when the pain first gets raised," said Sharon Wagner, CEO of Cloudyn, a provider of an automated cost management solution for analyzing cloud spending…